I will freely admit that the more I work with inline/anchored objects in InDesign CS5, the less I understand them. I don't even know what to call them anymore.

I am doing something very basic: it's a list of bios for a conference. Each bio consists of one or more paragraphs, and the image for that person needs to be at the beginning of the first paragraph, on the left.

The "dumb" way to do this would be to wait until I receive all bios, get it finalized and in place, then put in images on their own layer with wrap, precisely adjust each image individually, and decide where to stick in manual page breaks.

So I thought I would try the "smart" way and attach images to paragraphs so that I can just add additional bios and text as I receive them. And to create an object style that will keep the images in the right place and allow for global adjustments later.

But with inline images, I have an issue with graphics hanging off the bottom of the text frame, as below. These images are inline with a -9p3 y offset.

I also tried to go with the "custom" setting for an anchored object, which prevents the object from hanging out of the text frame thanks to the "keep within boundaries setting,: but there are 2 issues: the object doesn't know to stay aligned with the first line of the paragraph when the frame boundary interferes, and for some reason I can't fathom the first line of text won't wrap properly, as below:

What I want, ideally, is a way I can apply an object style to an image that will make it stay aligned with the top line of a paragraph unless there is not enough room for the image in the frame, in which case it will flow to the next page. Hope that makes sense.

Well I see from Peter's reply to another question that "text wrap on custom anchored objects behaves differently than for inlines -- it only affects the lines following the line containing the insertion point." So that explains that part of it, at least.

As I further think about it, I could eliminate the problem of the image hanging outside of the frame if I were to make as part of the first bio paragraph style a keep option that ensured that at least the number of lines equal to the height of the image kept together. But I'm not sure if I can do that in "keep" options, with first paragraphs of varying lengths.

As I further think about it, I could eliminate the problem of the image hanging outside of the frame if I were to make as part of the first bio paragraph style a keep option that ensured that at least the number of lines equal to the height of the image kept together. But I'm not sure if I can do that in "keep" options, with first paragraphs of varying lengths.

You can specify how many lines to keep together at the start of the paragraph and set that to the image height. it gets tricky, though, if there are too few lines. In those cases you could add a local override to the following paragraph in CS5 or later to Keep with Previous.